World IPv6 Day was a technical testing and publicity event in 2011 sponsored and organized by the Internet Society and several large Internet content services to test and promote public IPv6 deployment. [1] Following the success of the 2011 test day, the Internet Society carried out a World IPv6 Launch day on June 6, 2012 which, instead of just a test day, was planned to permanently enable IPv6 for the products and services of the participants. [2]
World IPv6 Day was announced on January 12, 2011 with five anchoring companies: Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Akamai Technologies, and Limelight Networks. [3] The event started at 00:00 UTC on June 8, 2011 and ended 23:59 the same day. [4] The main motivation for the event was to evaluate the real world effects of the IPv6 brokenness as seen by various synthetic tests. To this end, during World IPv6 Day major web companies and other industry players enabled IPv6 on their main websites for 24 hours. An additional goal was to motivate organizations across the industry – Internet service providers, hardware makers, operating system vendors and web companies – to prepare their services for IPv6, so as to ensure a successful transition from IPv4 as address space runs out [5]
The test primarily consisted of websites publishing AAAA records, which allow IPv6 capable hosts to connect using IPv6. Although Internet service providers (ISP) have been encouraged to participate, they were not expected to deploy anything active on that day, just increase their readiness to handle support issues. The concept was widely discussed at the 2010 Google IPv6 Conference. [6]
Many companies and organizations participated in the experiment, including the largest search engines, social networking websites and Internet backbone & content distribution networks. [7]
There were more than 400 participants in the original World IPv6 Day. [8] included some of the most heavily accessed destinations on the Internet, content distribution networks, [9] as well as various Internet service and infrastructure providers including: [10] Comcast, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Yandex [11] YouTube, Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, Microsoft, Vonage, AOL, Mapquest, T-Online, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Huawei, the US Department of Commerce, MasterCard, the BBC, and Telmex.
Major carriers measured the percentage of IPv6 traffic of all Internet traffic as increasing from 0.024 to 0.041 with respect to native and tunneled stacks combined.[ citation needed ] Most IPv6 traffic in consumer access networks was to Google sites. Demonstrating the need for content sites to adopt IPv6 for success, the biggest increase was actually in 6to4 transitional technologies. Early results indicated that the day passed according to plan and without significant problems for the participants. [12]
Cisco and Google reported no significant issues during the test. [13] [14] Facebook called the results encouraging, and decided to leave their developer site IPv6-enabled as a result. [15] But the consensus was that more work needed to be done before IPv6 could consistently be applied. [16] [17]
The participants said they would continue to perform detailed analyses of the data. Many participants found it worthwhile to continue to maintain dual-stacks. [18]
Following the success of the original World IPv6 Day, the exercise was repeated on June 6, 2012 as the World IPv6 Launch, this time with the intention of leaving IPv6 permanently enabled on all participating sites. [19] The event was billed as "this time, it's for real". [20]
Participants in the World IPv6 Launch included participants from the 2011 test day, and many more, including the Wikimedia Foundation, which permanently enabled IPv6 on its sites, including Wikipedia.
According to Alain Fiocco of Cisco, content that currently receives roughly 30% of global World Wide Web IPv4 pageviews should now have become available via IPv6 after World IPv6 Launch Day. [21] IPv6 traffic on AMS-IX rose by 50% on the launch day, from 2 Gbit/s to 3 Gbit/s. [22] IPv6 traffic on Amsterdam Internet Exchange was measured by ether type distribution as 0.4 percent, while IPv4 was measured as 99.6 percent on average in both daily and weekly graphs. [23]
The history of the Internet has its origin in information theory and the efforts of scientists and engineers to build and interconnect computer networks. The Internet Protocol Suite, the set of rules used to communicate between networks and devices on the Internet, arose from research and development in the United States and involved international collaboration, particularly with researchers in the United Kingdom and France.
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 was developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and is intended to replace IPv4. In December 1998, IPv6 became a Draft Standard for the IETF, which subsequently ratified it as an Internet Standard on 14 July 2017.
A router is a networking device that forwards data packets between computer networks. Routers perform the traffic directing functions between networks and on the global Internet. Data sent through a network, such as a web page or email, is in the form of data packets. A packet is typically forwarded from one router to another router through the networks that constitute an internetwork until it reaches its destination node.
A virtual private network (VPN) is a mechanism for creating a secure connection between a computing device and a computer network, or between two networks, using an insecure communication medium such as the public Internet. A VPN can extend a private network, enabling users to send and receive data across public networks as if their devices were directly connected to the private network. The benefits of a VPN include security, reduced costs for dedicated communication lines, and greater flexibility for remote workers. VPNs are also used to bypass internet censorship. Encryption is common, although not an inherent part of a VPN connection.
Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination IP address is shared by devices in multiple locations. Routers direct packets addressed to this destination to the location nearest the sender, using their normal decision-making algorithms, typically the lowest number of BGP network hops. Anycast routing is widely used by content delivery networks such as web and DNS hosts, to bring their content closer to end users.
Deep packet inspection (DPI) is a type of data processing that inspects in detail the data being sent over a computer network, and may take actions such as alerting, blocking, re-routing, or logging it accordingly. Deep packet inspection is often used to baseline application behavior, analyze network usage, troubleshoot network performance, ensure that data is in the correct format, check for malicious code, eavesdropping, and internet censorship, among other purposes. There are multiple headers for IP packets; network equipment only needs to use the first of these for normal operation, but use of the second header is normally considered to be shallow packet inspection despite this definition.
IP multicast is a method of sending Internet Protocol (IP) datagrams to a group of interested receivers in a single transmission. It is the IP-specific form of multicast and is used for streaming media and other network applications. It uses specially reserved multicast address blocks in IPv4 and IPv6.
The Toronto Internet Exchange Community (TorIX) is a not-for-profit Internet Exchange Point (IXP) located in a carrier hotel at 151 Front Street West, Equinix's TR2 data centre at 45 Parliament Street and 905 King Street West in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As of March 2021, TorIX has 259 unique autonomous systems representing 285 peer connections and peak traffic rates of 1.344 Tbps, making it the largest IXP in Canada. According to Wikipedia's List of Internet Exchange Points by Size, TorIX is the 16th largest IXP in the world in numbers of peers, and 17th in the world in traffic averages. The Exchange is organized and run by industry professionals in voluntary capacity.
The mobile web refers to mobile browser-based World Wide Web services accessed from handheld mobile devices, such as smartphones or feature phones, through a mobile or other wireless network.
IPv4 address exhaustion is the depletion of the pool of unallocated IPv4 addresses. Because the original Internet architecture had fewer than 4.3 billion addresses available, depletion has been anticipated since the late 1980s, when the Internet started experiencing dramatic growth. This depletion is one of the reasons for the development and deployment of its successor protocol, IPv6. IPv4 and IPv6 coexist on the Internet.
Split tunneling is a computer networking concept which allows a user to access dissimilar security domains like a public network and a local area network or wide area network at the same time, using the same or different network connections. This connection state is usually facilitated through the simultaneous use of a LAN network interface controller (NIC), radio NIC, Wireless LAN (WLAN) NIC, and VPN client software application without the benefit of an access control.
An IPv6 transition mechanism is a technology that facilitates the transitioning of the Internet from the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) infrastructure in use since 1983 to the successor addressing and routing system of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6). As IPv4 and IPv6 networks are not directly interoperable, transition technologies are designed to permit hosts on either network type to communicate with any other host.
Deployment of the Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), the latest generation of the Internet Protocol, has been in progress since the mid-2000s. IPv6 was designed as a replacement for IPv4. IPv4 has been in use since 1982, and is in the final stages of exhausting its unallocated address space, but still carries most Internet traffic.
Proxy Mobile IPv6 is a network-based mobility management protocol standardized by IETF and is specified in RFC 5213. It is a protocol for building a common and access technology independent of mobile core networks, accommodating various access technologies such as WiMAX, 3GPP, 3GPP2 and WLAN based access architectures. Proxy Mobile IPv6 is the only network-based mobility management protocol standardized by IETF.
The Internet Protocol for Smart Objects (IPSO) Alliance was an international technical standards organization promoting the Internet Protocol (IP) for what it calls "smart object" communications. The IPSO Alliance was a non-profit organization founded in 2008 with members from technology, communications and energy companies. The Alliance advocated for IP networked devices in energy, consumer, healthcare, and industrial uses. On 27 March 2018, the IPSO Alliance merged with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) to form OMA SpecWorks.
Juniper M series is a line of multiservice edge routers designed and manufactured by Juniper Networks, for enterprise and service provider networks. It spans over M7i, M10i, M40e, M120, and M320 platforms with 5 Gbit/s up to 160 Gbit/s of full-duplex throughput. The M40 router was the first product by Juniper Networks, which was released in 1998. The M-series routers run on JUNOS Operating System.
Hurricane Electric is a global Internet service provider offering internet transit, tools, and network applications, as well as data center colocation and hosting services at two locations in Fremont, California, where the company is based.
6rd is a mechanism to facilitate IPv6 rapid deployment across IPv4 infrastructures of Internet service providers (ISPs).
In the field of IPv6 deployment, IPv6 brokenness was bad behavior seen in early tunneled or dual stack IPv6 deployments where unreliable or bogus IPv6 connectivity is chosen in preference to working IPv4 connectivity. This often resulted in long delays in web page loading, where the user had to wait for each attempted IPv6 connection to time out before the IPv4 connection was tried. These timeouts ranged from being near-instantaneous in the best cases, to taking anywhere between four seconds to three minutes.